I got up at 520AM to pee -- hell, I wasn't sleeping much anyhow and called my parents. They were okay, but scared. A lot of people were missing and some people had died. They'd managed to keep their electricity and phone, but water had blown across the road by a culvert on one of the roads that they use to leave the farm.

My dad's rain gauge had measured nearly 9 inches of rain before it overflowed. My dad estimated closer to 11 inches of rain over the weekend.

Their boat had lost its mooring at Spafford Lake, a place where the main road had simply washed away. A neighbor had tied the boat to a tree, but my parents were worrying that if they didn't get the boat that the boat would be stuck on top of the neighbor's pier when the water receded and they'd never be able to get it out of there. The water had been 5 feet up, but had dropped to 3 feet, so it's going down, but the fear in my mom's voice really did a lot to add to my feeling of dread and helplessness.

After much detouring and driving around to get there, they retrieved their boat and waited for hours for the marina folks to detour and drive around to get it. The boat is put up and they got home safe after hours and hours of driving, when it should have only been 1-2 hours of driving. My mom called me at 10PM her time and said they'd gotten dinner at 9, she was washing dishes and heading to bed.

She was so upset. She said Alstead was flattened. She said that most of the people wouldn't have thought to have flood insurance -- the Connecticut River wasn't the problem, it was all the small streams and rivers that overflowed and caused all the flooding. New England is kind of like a rainforest and is full of these small streams and brooks. With that much rain, all of those small babbling brooks became roaring rivers tearing away the foundations of homes.

My mom said neighbors of theirs on the lake are missing. This couple's house is intact, but their truck was in a river and they were nowhere to be found.